March 2, 1997

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

Israelis, an Israeli scholar says, were not brought up to value individuals over the state

RUBBER BULLETS
Power and Conscience
in Modern Israel.
By Yaron Ezrahi.
308 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

ince the day the radical bourgeois took their seats to the left of the conservative aristocrats in the French revolutionary assembly more than 200 years ago, we have been stuck with a political image that obscures more than it illuminates. The terminology of ''liberal'' and ''conservative'' is almost as confusing and fruitless. That applies not least in Israel, with its stereotypes of ''right-wing'' nationalists and religious zealots opposed by a secular liberal left.

On the face of it, Yaron Ezrahi fits conventional categories: academic liberal, leftist, peacenik. On the face of it also, ''Rubber Bullets'' covers the well-trodden ground of Israeli-Palestinian relations and Israel's inner conflicts. In fact, this is one of the most original and stimulating books about Israel and Zionism for a long time. The title refers to the bullets, metal coated with rubber, adopted during the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980's by Israeli forces willing to wound but afraid to strike dead. Mr. Ezrahi takes this as a metaphor.

He sees that ''the rubber bullet was, of course, a fantasy that could be neither effective enough militarily nor morally acceptable against stone-throwing Palestinians.'' He wonders whether the rubber bullets were meant to spare those at whom they were fired, ''or, rather, to protect the tender souls of Israeli soldiers.'' And yet he still believes that the way Israel dealt with the uprising marked a genuine turning point in attitudes.

Even this is almost peripheral to the true theme of his book, which is as much a challenge to the left as to the nationalist right. What he says is of particular interest to American readers, since it sheds further light on the great, albeit often unrecognized, gulf between the Jewish state and Jewish America, which for so long gave its heart to a country about which it actually knew very little. His argument could be said to turn on the word ''liberalism.''

There is a sense in which almost all Americans are liberals, not excluding the neocons who use that word as a curse, but this is not the usual journalistic sense of the word. That's to say, Americans believe instinctively in a pluralist, individualistic, open society. Jewish Americans may have been (and remain) to the left of the American average. But even when many of them were more openly critical of materialistic capitalism than they are now, they found themselves thriving in a country whose underlying value was liberal individualism. American culture has always stressed individual fulfillment over duty owed to the state; the nation's very founding creed was ''life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.''

Which was just what Zionism rejected. In that same sense of the word, Israel was deeply illiberal in its origins. Although it was a free country, it was also for long much the most collectivized society outside the Communist bloc. Only a small (and now reduced) minority of Israelis ever lived on a kibbutz, but the kibbutz epitomized the Zionist attempt ''to create and shape the Israeli-born Jew as a new kind of Jew.''

Looking back, you don't have to be a crazed militiaman or an Ayn Rander to be dubious about that attempt. The kibbutz meant not merely socialist production and collectivized agriculture but socialist family life and collectivized child rearing. Parents saw almost nothing of their own children, children were encouraged to think of the kibbutz itself as their mother and father, and the most despised value of all was privacy.

Mr. Ezrahi describes brilliantly how Zionism came to devalue the Western ideals of individual happiness and self-realization. Some of this stemmed from circumstances. Life under siege, ''coupled with a delayed reaction to the Holocaust, reinforced the tendency to idealize state power and weakened the force of liberal-democratic principles.'' But more stemmed from Zionist ideology, with its heroic collective national narrative that denied ''cultivating the solitary self, the lyrical personal voice of the individual.''

Indeed, there are three versions of this narrative. Orthodox religion sees the lives of the multitude ''cemented by a single superhuman author who inscribes both nature and history.'' National Zionism sees the Jew as a member of a persecuted minority, and the fate of the individual as determined by membership in the group ''rather than by personal resources, talents or chance.'' And socialist Zionism adds its own version. The combination is

formidable.

Sometimes Mr. Ezrahi seems hard on his country. Even the title, with its scope for irony and skepticism, is a reminder that Israel does have the conscience as well as the power of his subtitle. Some of us who once covered South Africa will recall the Afrikaner police chief rounding on a reporter: ''Listen, man, we will fire rubber bullets when they throw rubber rocks.'' Better rubber bullets than the plain kind against riotous crowds; if they seem hypocritical, isn't hypocrisy what La Rochefoucauld called ''the homage vice pays to virtue''?

Again, to illustrate the suppression of the individual in Israel, Mr. Ezrahi observes that ''autobiography -- as the voice of the first person singular, of the self-reflecting, self-narrating individual, not as a soldier or missionary of a particular collective -- has not flourished in Jewish or Zionist culture.'' The memoirs of Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Shimon Peres, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Shamir ''do not address the inner life of their author, nor do they provide honest, reflective narrative of the writing, or speaking, self.''

He is right about those books. He is wrong in thinking this peculiar to Israel or its politicians. Mr. Ezrahi should try some of the equivalent books from my own country. The dire category of modern political autobiography has recently produced a subgenre -- the memoirs of British cabinet ministers of the 1980's -- outstanding even in this field for self-importance, self-justification and lack of self-honesty, not to mention sheer tedium (one of these Tory autobiographers was congratulated by a critic for managing to stay awake while he wrote his book).

Nevertheless, Mr. Ezrahi's underlying message is vitally important, and one that only an Israeli could have given. Not only can an Israeli criticize his own society with a candor almost impossible for outsiders, Jewish or gentile, but only an Israeli -- and by his own lights a patriotic one -- could cut through the Zionist rhetoric that perplexes not only anti-Zionists but those who claim to revere Israel. Mr. Ezrahi is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and occasionally writes like one. Mostly he writes not as a scholar, or even as an activist, but as a human being.

A while ago, Michael Kinsley wrote that Jewish Americans envied Israelis for living out history in a way that made the comfort and security of life in New York or Los Angeles seem jejune. This may be so. But ''Rubber Bullets'' explains why many Israelis -- by no means easily categorized on obvious political lines -- increasingly envy Americans not just their material prosperity but their freedom to pursue happiness and individual destiny.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a columnist for The Express of London and the author of ''The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma.''